ninja is faster at parsing large makefiles and I'm reasonably certain it's because it lacks certain expensive features of make. Do you need those features? You

ninja is faster at parsing large makefiles and I'm reasonably certain it's because it lacks certain expensive features of make. Do you need those features? You'd have to read about make to find out but it boils down to there being not much performance difference for small builds so make might have an edge there. When you get to android sized builds the reading of makefiles can take minutes and ninja wins there enough to make it worth sacrificing the features.